Peter's Place

OK, So I'm having a Twiscussion with this self-proclaimed geek from Salt Lake City, UT who developed a really cool social networking app . Seeing that he (and his company) were from Salt Lake City, UT, and knowing how the Mormons provided a massive amount of funding to support California's Proposition 8 I sent him a simple question: Did you (or your corporation) provide any funding to support CA's Prop 8? And thus began our Twiscussion (I'm coining a lot of new words these days ...). I'm glad to say that Jesse has not provided any funds in support of Prop 8; however, in our discussion, he raised a really good, and valid, point: [W]hat studies have been done to show there was money against Prop 8 in SLC? I'd venture to say none that are public. I don't know about the money but I do know that there was a rally opposing Prop 8 in SLC last year. So my fellow blogophiles, since I'm kinda spending the vast majority of my time dealing with personal and fa...

Slashdot | A Teacher Asking Students To Destroy Notes? OK, in the (likely) event that I ever pursue education in the future, I'm going to make damned sure that I enter into a written contract with each and every professor/trainer/teacher, wherein I obtain an explicit permission that any notes (note: not recordings but notes I create of my own accord based on the information presented in the classroom/labs via lecture and otherwise) I take on the presentations made during class are and will forever belong to me and that such professor/trainer/teacher shall have no right, claim, expectation or any such expectation of having my notes delivered unto them following conclusion of the course/training. Oh, and by the way, for the record, IANAL and TINLA (but I did attend law school for two years); however, in order to prevent such a thing from happening again, I suggest (in the form of friendly advice) that every student enter into such a contract. On a personal note, I really would like...

I just made a post on my Gather.com account and coined a new word in the process. That word is webtivism Webtivism is a portmanteau of "Web Activism." That is, webtivism is intentional action taken to bring about social or political change solely and strictly through the world wide web/Internet. A great example of "webtivism" is the First Virtual March for LGBT Equality . In this particular case of webtivism, participants were asked to change their profile picture on Web 2.0 sites (e.g., social networking web sites such as Facebook.com ) to one of thirteen different logos created by the web site, for a period of one week, in an effort to make a statement in support of gay rights. I hereby copyright the portmanteau word, webtivism. webtivism (c) 16 January 2009, Peter C. Frank

You may recall that I last wrote about my niece, Jennal, in October 2008 when she had a really bad episode . I haven't really been keeping up with my blog lately but something just happened and I need to do a little writing to try and remain calm. So at the beginning of the month, my niece, Jennal (pictured to the right) went into hospital @ NYU Medical Center in NYC. The purpose of this hospitalization was to induce her into having seizures, while she's hooked up to monitoring equipment, to map where in the brain the seizures are originating. Hopefully, once they find out where the seizures are originating, the doctors hope to remove those sections of her brain, provided that they're "unused" sections. Basically, they're going to do a partial lobotomy or something like that (brain surgery on a 4.5-year old). I don't think it's the greatest idea in the world and it's all very experimental but I'm not her guardian, and at least finding out whe...

This news story popped up in my Google Desktop Sidebar . What I thought interesting, apartment from being a Cadillac lover myself (my dream car being the 2009 Cadillac CTS-V --I mean, just take a look at the specs on that baby, and the baby itself (to the left!) ... too bad we all know I can barely afford a 1985 Yugo at this point in my life) was a statement made by Clay Dean, who is employed by General Motors as the global design director for the entire Cadillac division. In fact, there was one statement that he made, in particular, which caught my attention and serves as the reason for this particular blog posting. You see, Mr. Dean still thinks he has to use code-speak in order to deliver a message; he doesn't give the average consumer or--in this case--the gay consumer enough credit to know that he's talking about us. Here's the statement that caught my attention: "For GM, it's our most aggressive brand," said Clay Dean, GM's global director for Cadil...